


Wayfarer's Daughter

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Der Ring des Nibelungen | The Ring of the Nibelung - Wagner
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-18
Updated: 2006-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 02:16:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1626242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the world was young, they sang songs about my sisters. (Brunnhilde and Siegfried, long after the fact.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wayfarer's Daughter

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to write Wagner!fic, but I think I may have ended up squarely in Norse!Mythology!fic instead. I really did try. 
> 
> Written for xenacryst

 

 

When the world was young, they sang songs about my sisters. Our names rang out around their fires, and on their battlefields. Men called to us in anger or fear or supplication; women cursed us with one breath, and bargained with us the next.

The world turned. New gods supplanted the old, and people remembered us only in stories, growing more distant with each year. Now, when a man falls in battle, he frowns to see us.

"Who are you? Are you-- Death?"

"I have come to bring you home, Brave One," we say, and as his face lights up, he leaps up behind us, because in his bones, he still remembers.

 

***

In my father's halls, warriors bide the long years in comfort. There is drink, meat, song, women: whatever warriors thought their reward would be in the afterlife is there, and men being men, those dreams change but little from one generation to the next.

My sisters and I choose among the fallen and bring our father the finest of them, and the younger of us happily serve in the halls, pouring mead and evading groping hands. The years pass, and pass, and pass.

But I, I remember him still, and am discontent.

He burned bright, in death even. The glare led me to him in his next life, and the next, and the next. Does he know me? I think not, not while he lives. In a handful of his deaths, I have thought I saw-- not recognition, but something like unto it. I cannot be sure.

In all of his lives, he seeks to do battle, although the trappings change. Sometimes he weds, often he dies unmarried, but he always dies, and it is always violently.

"Such is the province of men," my mother says. "They fight, they rut, they die; it is of no concern to me."

She fixes me with a stern, granite-hard gaze. "It should be of no concern to you, Daughter."

My mother is Erda, the Earth One herself, and to father me she chose Odin of many names, the Wanderer, One-Eye. From this union I was born, and I disappoint them both.

She speaks of birth, always of birth, and the menfolk who are allowed to bed her are for her pleasure, and the children they get in her belly. They mean little to her, and their comings and goings in this world pass unnoticed.

"He is only a mortal, and only a man," she says, and stares at me, looking for a sign that I understand. I look away.

I shame her, with my petty, impossible longings. I shame myself.

 

***

I bring a new warrior for my father, a dusky-skinned man who died cursing his enemy's lands. My father likes such men, with their blind, stupid courage.

"Come," I say, and walk toward the dais. The warrior follows me, looking everywhere at once, stunned. As we approach, Greed and Fierce growl a warning.

"Hail, Wand-Bearer," I say, and the wolves quiet. My father looks up, and grins to see my gift, which even now trembles at my side.

"You bring me a warrior?"

I bow to him. "He fought foolish and without hope of victory, Longbeard. I thought you would wish for him to fight at your side, come Twilight."

My father laughs. The thing we like best in each other is this, the ability to make each other laugh. There is not much else, I think.

"Be welcome," he tells the warrior. "May your heart be light and your mug heavy."

I touch the warrior's shoulder, and turn to lead him away, but my father clears his throat, hesitantly, which is so unlike him that I pause in my retreat.

"Daughter," he says. "I am told that you go to visit a man."

The hall quiets. It is not forbidden, exactly, for my sisters and I to take a mortal lover, but it is something beyond scandal. I shift my helmet to my left hand. Its solid, familiar weight comforts me.

"Yes," I say, finally. "I go to watch him, sometimes."

This is a lie. It is more than sometimes. I go as often as I can, as often as I think I will not be missed, and sometimes more often than that. In this life, he has a woman, and they are happy together. Many nights, I watch them in their marriage bed. They are happy together in that way, as well. It hurts like a blade plunging in, to watch this, but it is somehow better than nothing.

"A mortal," the God of Wishes says, and sighs. I think that my mother and he would have much to sigh over, together, if they still spoke.

"Yes," I say, again.

"What if I asked you not to go to him again?"

"I would still go," I say, ashamed, but honest. I do not pause before answering.

My father rolls his staff in his hand, once, twice. I hear it grate on the flagstones beneath his feet.

"And if I forbid it outright?"

"Then I will bring you no more heroes," I say.

He twitches, and Thought and Memory fly up, cawing. The sound echoes in the rafters. Men shift anxiously on the long benches. There is often brawling, here, but the Allfather, in his hall of halls, is slow to anger, and they are right to be wary.

"Ah," my father says, after a long silence. "You are as stubborn as the rocks I got you on, Eldest Daughter."

"I am as my father made me, Spear-Shaker."

He grins. The hollow of his empty socket is shadowed by the torchlight, and for a moment I imagine an eye winks back at me.

"Pah," he spits. "Do as you will, then. Visit your mortal."

I bow my head. The moment passes: Twice-Blind calls for mead for his new hero. There will be tales told tonight.

 

***

What if he cannot forgive me?

This is what I do not ask my mother, when she palms my belly at each visit and sighs, disappointed, that I still do not quicken.

"Take a man," she says. "You collect so many heroes for the army of Quick-to-Deceive. None of them are to your liking? None of them make your blood run hot?"

She makes a dismissive sound - bah! Impossible. So many fine men, struck down in their prime, and none of them catch my eye? My mother, who takes no husband, takes many lovers to warm her bed, and finds this thought worthy of ridicule.

I push her hand away.

"You have a thousand daughters, Great One," I say. "Look for elsewhere for your children's children."

She pulls away, angered. I confuse her in this matter. She can feel my longing for life: she has felt it for a thousand of mankind's years. She is the embodiment of the Earth, where life makes a place for itself in the darkest crevasse of the deepest ocean, and it baffles her that anyone would choose to be barren.

"Why not take him to Hanging-God's hall, this time?" she asks me. "Why do you take him to my sisters, over and over again?"

She means: why do I take him to be reborn, each time? Why don't I take him to Valhalla, where he would feast with my father until Twilight comes? He and I could be together there. My father would allow it, she thinks, and I imagine that she's right. Yes, we angered the Overthrower, but it was so long ago, and this man has lived so many lives and died so many deaths since. My father grows old, and Twilight comes, and he cares less for things that once enraged him.

"I don't know," I say, and shrug. She hisses, but allows me to speak of other things until our visiting-time has passed.

 

***

He is dying.

My youngest sister waits behind me, but does not approach. Perhaps she hopes that I will change my mind, and bring him to our father, but I think she knows that I will not. Experience has taught her otherwise.

As he takes his last breath, I gather him up. My horse kneels down for me to mount, and we leap into the aether. My sister keeps pace for a time, then lets us escape.

She knows where I'm taking him.

This time, as each time before, I take him to the Norns. I bring one of my father's gold rings, and I give it to the middle sister, who is called That-Which-Is-Becoming, and I say: "For your love of my mother, Body-of-Earth, and your pity for my father, Many-Shaped, whose time is ending, and in return for this ring, I ask of you the one thing."

She sighs, coming back to herself. Her fingers still on the skein of yarn in her lap, and she looks up at me. Her eyes can see me, while her sisters, looking into the past and the future, barely recognize that I stand before them.

"So soon," she says, and squats before his body. "He died young, this time."

She pushes his hair off his face. He is still warm. This is the only time I can touch him, and my fingers ache for his skin.

"Child," she says, and stands, "take him to the Hall. Keep him there. Take what happiness you can find. Twilight is coming."

I wait, silent, and after a moment, That-Which-Is-Becoming holds out her hand. I place my father's ring in it, and she closes her fingers over its glory.

"So be it," she says. She looks away as I kneel and kiss his now-chilling lips.

"Daughter of my sister," the Norn says, as I turn to depart. "Why don't you take him home?"

She is mistress of the fates of men and Gods alike, and still there is puzzlement in her voice. I bow my farewell, but say nothing.

Long ago, when the world was young, we loved foolishly, and betrayed blindly, and died to seek redemption. I forgave him even before I rode into his funeral pyre. After a hundred of his lifetimes, I still do not know if he could forgive me if I asked, and what awaits us if he could not?

He would live in the Hall. He would know me. He would not love me.

And so, I content myself with this half-life of watching and watching and watching, and waiting for Twilight to come.

I am Brunnhilde, daughter of Erda and Odin, shieldmaiden, Valkyrie, stormrider, and this is beneath me.

But I loved a man, once.

It changed everything.

 

~fin~

 


End file.
